


Merge

by 852_Prospect_Archivist



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Episode related: S2p2, First Times, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-11 02:29:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/793011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/852_Prospect_Archivist/pseuds/852_Prospect_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blair attempts to come to terms with<br/>his 'death' and rebirth and what it all means.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Merge

## Merge

by Mona Ramsey

* * *

"Merge"  
by Mona Ramsey  
monaram@yahoo.com 

I think the thing that surprised me the most was that I didn't even realize that we hadn't talked until I was standing in the loft, just _looking_ at it, you know? Just dazed. And confused. I mean, hell, I'd had a _bit_ of a week - I'd been in another country, another _hemisphere_ with a psycho and my best friend - who kissed said psycho in front of me, not the best image I've ever had burned onto my retinas. Getting shot at, getting kidnapped, being tied up - and that didn't even _compare_ to the fact that I'd been _dead_ for a while at the start of it. Flight in, flight back, paperwork, yada yada yada - back here. And not one word - well, okay, what? five minutes in the hospital? That doesn't count. 

I must have looked somewhere near - forgive the pun - death warmed over. Ha ha ha, I made a funny. Anyway, I _felt_ as though I'd been dead, for the first time since - well, since I'd been _dead_ ; god, that word just doesn't get any easier, especially with its relative proximity to the word 'I' in every sentence - and I could happily have crawled into bed and stayed there for, oh, five or ten years. But I was standing there, looking - feeling - stunned, and he came up behind me. Scared the living crap right out of me. He's good like that. 

After I crawled down from the ceiling and my heartbeat returned to my chest from my ears, I was okay. As okay as I get. He was another matter. He looked - puppyish, lost. Awkward. What do you say to someone who you brought back from the dead? 

"You want something to eat, Chief? Drink?" 

That wouldn't have been my first choice. Still - "Nah. You go ahead, though." 

"I'm not hungry." 

I nodded, kept nodding, until I felt as though I was going to fall over. I should have gone to bed, I told my feet to take me to bed, but they ignored me. They do that sometimes. Took me to the couch, where my ass sat me down. Jim sat down next to me. That was good. 

There was about six minutes of silence - more than enough to start feeling uncomfortable, much more than the amount where you feel that if you actually say something you'll be able to cut out the awkwardness of the moment, and then you wonder why the other person isn't saying anything - and then I had to say it. "So." Brilliant. 

"What?" 

"I just said - " Well, it wasn't like I could _repeat_ it, could I? "How're you feeling?" 

"Shouldn't I be asking you that, Chief?" 

Yeah, but he didn't. "I'm okay." 

He was looking at me funny. "Really?" 

"Well - " I felt around. I _felt_ okay - I mean, I've felt better, but - "I'm not dead." Instant wince. That _wasn't_ what I meant to say. 

His voice got really deep, growly - like it does when he's really thinking hard about something. Or maybe when he's just really tired. "Yeah." 

I couldn't help it. I mean, we were being idiots \- both of us - and it just struck me: we'd been in the jungle, he was having visions, _I_ was having visions, I'd been dead, and then I wasn't, and we were going all the hell over the place, and I was tired, and we were having this _stupid_ conversation, and I just lost it. I started to laugh. Loudly. Hysterically. 

I don't know how long it was before it turned into tears, how long before I noticed. The next thing I _did_ notice was the fact that I was pressed up against something, and it felt good - something warm, something with little fine trembles, something that was holding me. 

Hell - if we weren't going to talk, then that was the next best thing. 

"Jim?" 

"Yeah." Deeper, and even _more_ gravelly. 

"I was dead." 

It took him a minute. "Yeah. I know. I was there." 

That set me off again. I think he probably thought that he was going to have to slap me out of it, but he didn't. The next thing I knew, he'd kissed me - really, really softly, very lightly, almost unbearably tender, and I was still pressed up against him. I was reasonably sure that I'd shorted out a few brain cells when I'd been - well, you know. "Jim?" 

"Yeah?" 

"Did you just kiss me?" Inane question number two. 

"Yeah." 

It was obvious to me that he was _not_ interested in talking, which was fine with me. I could barely wrap my tongue around the concept of words, much less make coherent ones emerge from my brain. And there are better things to do with a tongue, as I was quickly remembering. 

Hell, I wasn't _that_ dead. 

One of the interesting things about Jim is that he is _completely_ unlike me - I mean, older, taller, generally bigger, _cop_ \- and he's got this smooth skin, shows off the cut of his muscles. But when it comes right down to it, he's a guy. He's got all the necessary guy-stuff, and I was realizing this as I clutched against him, holding on like my life depended on it, and then I started to think that maybe my life _did_ depend on it. 

Think about it - that bringing me back from the dead thing wasn't your normal, everyday sentinel/guide occurrence; sure, he's kept me from being shot - mostly - and he watches out for me as much as I do him, but that wolf/panther vision was _weird_. There's no other way to describe it. He saved my _life_ , pulling me back from being dead. If it had been up to me, I'd have loped happily off into the woods, none the wiser. But it _wasn't_ up to me. He pulled me _back_. There's no separation - the panther _is_ Jim. 

And now the panther is me, too. And that's just fucking _weird_. 

I must have been thinking really loudly, because all of the time that all of that was running through my head, he was still kissing me. Finally, he pulled back, and - oh, a minute or two later I realized that he was looking at me. "What?" 

He smiled. "Shut up." 

I grinned at him. Boy, does _he_ have my number. "Okay." I had my hands on his chest, just sort of lying there, completely natural, on his pecs. "So what do you want to do, then?" 

"I don't know. What do _you_ want to do, Blair?" 

His lips were really soft - maybe it was the kissing that we'd already done, I don't know. I mean, it wasn't like I'd kissed him before. But, even in such bizarre circumstances, doing something that I hadn't even really thought of before, with a person whom I had never considered in that way before, it was - good. Weird, but good. Natural. And I was starting to figure out that a lot of my life was weird and good and natural. The police thing, the Jim thing, the kissing a guy thing - all of it, extremely high on the strange scale. Did I want to stop? Hell, no. 

I managed to pull my lips away from his long enough to grab his shirt and slide it up his body. "I don't know, Jim." More smooth muscle under there. He uncovered more of my own, fuzzier body himself. It felt to me as though we'd done this before - you know, like deja vu, where you see something or dream about something and you _know_ that you've been there, done that, even though you can't remember where or when? That's what this was like. It was as if we'd done it a hundred times. And I've never, I mean _never_ dreamed about Jim doing anything like this, or like me doing anything like this, for that matter. But we were doing it. 

So we were half-naked, still on the couch, still necking like there was no tomorrow. It struck me \- "Is this what it was like with Alex?" 

He looked at me, not like he should, like I'd said something terrible; he just looked at me and smiled. "No, Chief." 

"But didn't you say it was like some primitive mating instinct - " 

"Blair." 

"And this is just, so - " 

" _Chief_." 

"C'mon, Jim. You can't tell me you've thought about this before, okay? And this is just - " 

He smiled at me. 

"Oh, no way! You thought about this before and you didn't tell me?" 

"No. I didn't think about this before, and I wouldn't have told you if I had. But it feels - " He paused, groping around for a word. His hands were doing a little residual groping, as well. 

"Right?" I finished for him. I wanted that word to be the one that he wanted. _I_ wanted to be what he wanted. 

"Yeah. Like we've - " 

"Done this before," I said. "Oh, _man_! I was _just_ thinking the exact same - " 

And then he kissed me again. For an uptight police-type person, he's a damn good kisser. 

The second strange thing - or the fourteenth, depending on what you're counting - was that I was getting hard - well, _obviously_ , I mean, come on; but not an urgent, 'I have to fuck soon or I'm going to die' fifteen-year-old- walking-hormone hard, just an 'I want to be here doing this', warm and fuzzy kind of hard. Slow, gentle. I could have come in my pants just kissing him, and I could feel him pushing up against me, but we were on the _couch_ , and he's not exactly the compact model of masculinity that I am. One wrong move and one or both of us would be on our ass on the floor. 

"Jim?" 

"Yeah?" 

"You wanna - " I couldn't finish. I didn't even know what I was asking. 

He did. "Yeah." 

And then we were moving, off the couch, him tugging on my hand and leading me up to his room. I have no memory of stairs; my entire experience seems to be focused on his hand on mine, and the connection there, and the fact that the little wet spots on my face and chest where he'd licked or kissed me were making me shiver when I moved. 

When we got there - up - I just stood, again. I didn't know what to do, how to move, what we were doing. Moving away from him just seemed - _wrong_ , you know? - and I didn't know what to do with myself. He didn't give me the chance to consider it. When he realized that I wasn't following him anymore, he came over and got me. Led me to the bed. Sat me down. Sat beside me. 

"Chief?" 

"Um-hmm?" 

"You ever do this before?" 

I wondered how to answer that. I hadn't - done it, to coin a phrase - with a guy, but I'd kissed one before. When I was eight. Hey, no girls would kiss me when I was eight, and I thought they were stupid, and Tommy Michaelson dared me to kiss him, and I did. I never turned down a dare. I've got the nipple rings to prove it. "I'm not unfamiliar with the concept," I said, hedging. 

"Me, neither." 

"So what are we doing? What is this? Post traumatic stress disorder? 'Cause if I have this reaction every time I die, I don't think - " 

"Chief, stop it. That's not what this is and you know it." He stood up, moving around, for once getting a hint of that nervous energy that drives me so often. "Okay, maybe that's part of it. But it isn't all. You've been - hurt, before, and _this_ never happened. Think of the golden. Think of Lash." 

"I'd rather not, if you don't mind." 

"My point is, neither one of those times was enough to push us _here_. This was." 

"Did you see something in the grotto that you're not telling me?" 

He sighed, and sat down again. "I saw - I saw my life. The people that I care about, hurt, in danger. I saw you, Blair - I saw you smiling at me and laughing and then I saw you _dead_ on that lawn. And I knew that it was over, but it felt like - " He shook his head. "Like I was letting it happen all over again." 

"Jim - " I reached out for him, took his hand. "I'm okay, Jim. Really. It wasn't your fault that she drowned me." 

"It was, partly. I knew about her. I could have done something, but I didn't. I let her get away and then I let her get under my skin. I do _not_ run on hormones like that, completely forgetting what's real and important to me." 

I grinned. "You do that all the time, Jim." 

"Yeah?" he retorted. "Well, usually, _you're_ what's important to me." 

It was the closest thing to a full-out declaration of love that I'd ever had in my life. From the look on his face, it was the closest that he'd ever come, too. When I looked at him, I remembered that vision - panther and wolf, running towards each other, and then - merging. Together. A part of each other. Sentinel/Guide. Jim and _me_. "Shit." 

So it wasn't from Hallmark. It was honest. 

He grinned at me. "Yeah." 

"Do you think that we're meant to - " I couldn't say it, just trailed off, looking at the bed that we were sitting on. 

"I think that it's up to us, Blair. I think that whatever we are, _we_ decide." 

"'We'. I like that." 

"Whatever happens, you're stuck with me, Chief. If this past week didn't prove that, nothing will." He ruffled his hands through my hair, and it felt good. 

"I like that, too," I said, and ducked my head under his hand, aiming my mouth straight at his chest. I caught a nipple with my teeth and tugged, and my momentum and his surprise tumbled us over on the bed, him on his back, me on top of him, his hand still caught in my hair, my mouth on his chest. And I realized that he was right: we're part of each other. Whatever happens, happens because _we_ decide it, not because of some mystical experience. Because of reality. And my current dose of reality was telling me that I really wanted him, and I wanted him to want me, too. 

I kissed him again, parting his lips with my tongue, feeling the warmth of his mouth, the softness of his lips, the nubby velvet of his tongue as it stroked against mine. God, instant hardness again. Whatever my mind was thinking, my body obviously had its eyes on the prize. I pulled away, on my side now, face-to-face, looking at him. "I want this," I said. "I don't even know what it is, but I want it." 

His smile would have lit a small city. "Good. Me, too." He rolled over on top of me, mostly holding himself up so he wouldn't crush me, but letting me feel some of the weight of him. "What do we do?" 

"I haven't a clue," I said. "Naked would probably be good." 

"Yeah." He slid his hands down over my stomach, and I almost laughed at the soft tickle, but didn't want to break the mood. He kneeled back at the end of the bed and made short work of my jeans, tugging them down my legs as I wriggled them off. Thank god he paused for my socks, too; I hate waking up with hot feet. Then he ran his hands back _up_ my legs. "You're furry," he said, grinning. "I like it. It's - weird." 

I took that in the spirit in which I'm _sure_ it was intended. "Thanks," I said, making a face at him. Then I sat up and tugged at the belt of his pants. He stood up before I could do more than open the buckle, and dropped trou down to the floor. Man. Underwear. There was a wet spot on the front of his boxers. We locked eyes and stripped off that final bit of cloth   
simultaneously, and then that was it: we were naked. Not looking anywhere but each other's eyes. I knew - we knew - that whoever broke it, whoever looked first, would be the one. The sexual equivalent of 'It'. 

It was him. He kneeled back down at my feet and worked the same trail up my legs, unfolding his body over mine. When he got to my cock - _hard_ against my stomach - he completely blew my mind by licking it. 

I could _feel_ the explosion of saliva in his mouth when the taste of me first struck him. I was trying to calculate how much more intense it would be - my pre-come in his mouth, about a thousand times more pungent to him than the few times that I'd tasted myself after jerking off. My entire body shivered, and I wondered if I was going to come just from that swipe of his tongue over the head of my cock. A blow-job had never felt like that before; there was never that instant reaction, that tangible expression of lust that he'd just shown. 

And then he licked it again. And again. When he took the head fully into his mouth, I stopped thinking. All of the blood in my body was feeding my cock; the rest of me was completely dead except for those inches of hard flesh. My hips were thrusting and my ass was pushing against the mattress; I was face-fucking him and didn't even realize it until he pulled away, and there was a blast of cool air on my wet, throbbing cock. 

"Blair," he said, panting, resting his head against my stomach. "I don't think I can - " 

Oh, _man_. What the hell was I doing? I sat up, as painful as that was at the moment, drawing him against me. "Whatever _we_ decide, Jim," I reminded him, soft in his ear, and he smiled at me. 

"Okay," he nodded. "Right." 

I took that as carte blanche to start a little exploration on my own. Like I said before, in contrast to mine, his body is smooth, with little fine blond hairs that are barely noticeable, like the fuzz on a peach. I pushed him over on his back and straddled him, dipping my head down to give little swipes of my tongue over his body - on his neck, at his nipples, his armpits - which was actually better than it sounds - his belly-button. He was musky and sweating, his cock leaking like mine was, and the smells were intense. Not as intense for him, but they were driving me nuts. I never realized how good someone - a man, especially - could _smell_ , or taste. I licked a little pool of sweat from the centre of his chest, getting off on the intensity. I could have played with him like that all night, but he stopped me, grabbing my wrists in his hands and pushing my arms down towards his cock. "Please, Blair." 

_That_ I knew I wanted to experience first-hand - or first-tongue, I should say. I grinned as that thought came into my mind, my mouth watering at the remembrance of Jim's mouth on _me_. I knew my hair was tickling his stomach; I could feel the mini-earthquake that rumbled through his body as I brushed it back and forth over his skin, teasing him, wondering how far I could go. 

Turns out that _I_ had less self-control than the big guy; before he even had a chance to threaten me with bodily harm I had my mouth on his cock, licking some of the stream of pre-come that was attaching it in a thin membrane to his stomach. It was salty, kind of bitter; not the best thing I'd ever tasted in my life but far from the worst. Of course, it wasn't actually the 'real thing', but it was a good start. And the fact that it was Jim - that Jim was on the verge of coming from being naked with _me_ \- well, that blew all thought out of my mind. Somehow, knowing that you have the power to turn someone on like that, to make them hard and make them _come_ \- that's incredible. And I'd never even considered it that way before, you know - it had always been important that the women that I'd slept with have a good time, but that was more about _my_ ego than me wanting to be altruistic. This - _this_ was Jim, Jim thrusting up against my mouth, Jim with his hands pressed against my skull, Jim wanting me. 

Jim _really_ wanting to come. 

I didn't pull away. I didn't know if I'd be able to take it, but I was willing to give it a try. I didn't want to take my mouth away from him; didn't want to stop feeling what he was feeling. He was speaking - moaning, maybe trying to warn me, I don't know, but I thought that if he didn't know that I knew he was going to come he was nuts \- and I stayed there, with him, coaxing him. I wanted it. 

When he came, I took the first spurt of it in my mouth and swallowed, trying not to gag. It was hot, acrid, about ten times as strong as the pre-come; _definitely_ too much for the first time. I let the rest of it hit me in the face, closing my eyes, some of it landing on my chest, some on his stomach. When he was done I groped around for the sheet, wiping myself and him off on it. 

He grinned at me, when he could connect synapses with the muscles in his face again. "You're a mess," he said, pulling me up. There was still come in my hair; I could feel it. He reached for a sticky strand and put it in his mouth, sucking it clean. "How was it?" he asked. 

I looked at him, wondering what I should say. First time nerves, you know? I wanted to do it again, that much I knew; I wanted to become expert at giving Jim head and receiving it from him; I wanted to know how to fuck him and make him come; I wanted everything that two guys could have together. With _Jim_. "Okay." 

"Liar." 

That's when I realized that it was _his_ hand on my dick and not my own, and he was stroking me. I was close, amazed that I hadn't come already, _so_ ready for it, and I closed my eyes and let him stroke me, thrusting up in a rhythm against his sweaty, sticky body. My come joined his on his stomach, and when he'd finished jerking me off he raised a slimy finger to his mouth and tasted _me_ , raising his eyebrows. "Not bad." 

"Liar," I accused. "I have a new respect for my old lovers, you know." 

"I have a new respect for your old lovers, too." 

I smacked him on the chest, making him groan. 

"What?" 

"It was good because it was you," I said. "Not because of the taste, and not in spite of it. It was good because _you_ were coming, at least in part because I was there." 

He nodded. "I know. You think this ever going to stop being weird?" 

"I don't know," I sighed. "Probably." 

"After we've done it a couple of thousand times?" 

I smiled, secretly pleased. "Yeah." 

"Too bad." 

The End  
MonaR.  
monaram@mailcity.com/monaram@iname.com 


End file.
